6/02/2009

PLAYING to LOSE

5·12·09Silly boy, puzzles don't get solved, they get organized, reassembled, or taken apart.

What I am to you, is not what you mean to me.

You'd sting me in the knees, and make them weak, like paper.To find a beekeeper who puts up with the stingers.

Because we have never been more aware of our own ignorance, and also because we have a tendency to generate questions more rapidly than we resolve them, you might say that we know both more than we ever have before, and less than ever.

"...I want you all to think very loudly, so the rest of us can hear."-PZ Meyers

[Human]kind can not will what it wills.~Arthur Schopenhauer

Concentrated sunlight.

We should try getting some VR goggles to screw around with. And webcams to mount on them. There is some stuff that could be really cool.

Isn't it obvious? Any war, including the ``war on terror'', can most efficiently and effectively and completely be won with a PR campaign. Access to a large advanced well funded pool of entertainment and consumer markets is the true opiate of the masses, and if we want to overpower, control, compete, or invade any country, that is how we should go about doing it. It's how we control our own people.

5·15·09Force driftIf you look back through the history of science, it is clearly an iterative process, a repeated distilling of information, a limiting process with no clear end.Science is essentially the repeated distillation of ideas, boiling off the nonsense, and re-condensing ideas that fit in with the evidence."that's the way it goes, but don't forget, it goes the other way too." That's the way romance is... Usually, that's the way it goes, but every once in awhile, it goes the other way too.—Alabama Whitman

5·16·09What?What just happened.Awesome.Did it go from an obvious consequence to an undeniable reality? or from a 50/50 chance to a randomly selected outcome?What do you think I think about what you think I think you've been thinking about?intensionality

I thinkI think you thinkI think you think that I thinkI think you think that I think that you think

If we begin by assigning prior probabilities to all potential hypotheses, should we also include the possibility that we do not yet know, and should it be weighted differently? The two weighting options that first come to mind are assign the "we don't know" hypothesis a prior probability of 50%, or assign it an equal prior as the rest of the hypotheses (1/(N+1) for N hypotheses).

5·18·09"If it disagrees with experiment—its wrong. In that simple statement, is the key to science. It doesn't make a difference how beautiful your guess is it doesn't make a difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is. If it disagrees with experiment, its wrong. Thats all there is to it.""History is fundamentally irrelevant.""We never, are right, we can only be sure we're wrong."-Richard Feynman

5·25·09I just got an idea, from the reincarnation bank. I've had this idea before, but now it's a little more developed. We should start a website for people to place bets on when the apocalypse will occur!

"Sometimes we're on a collision course, and we just don't know it. Whether it's by accident or by design, there's not a thing we can do about it."-Benjamin Button

How much of this shit will we put up with? In just the last few years the catholic church has paid out more than a billion dollars in settlements for sexual offenses; they excommunicated everyone involved in the abortion of twins conceived in a 9 year old when raped by her father; they said that condoms increase the risk for aids; they have known, apparently for decades, about their pederast priests; they have, also for decades, systematically abused and tortured Irish catholic children. When the fuck is enough finally enough? Doesn't the complete deconstruction of the church, with all proceeds benefiting their victims, STILL fall completely short of undoing all the damage? Is there any other comparably reasonable first step to take?

The enormity of the circumstances that contribute directly to any particular outcome are so far removed from our influence, its amazing we ever get anything done.

"There's no time limit, start whenever you want. You can change or stay the same, there are no rules to this thing. We can make the best or the worst of it. I hope you make the best of it. And I hope you see things that startle you. I hope you feel things you never felt before. I hope you meet people with a different point of view. I hope you live a life you're proud of. And if you find that you're not, I hope you have the strength to start all over again." -Benjamin Button

5·26·09Opposition to torture, for me personally, isn't so much because I think it is sick/cruel/inhuman/sadistic/disgusting/SAVAGE/BARBARIC/UNCIVIL and deeply unsettling, it's because it seems very unlikely to be effective. Even in the ticking time bomb scenario, why would they give away their big plan? It's on par with James Bond villains blurting out their plan to their mortal enemy. And even if they gave you valid information, how long is it going to remain valid? Do you think they're so stupid that if one of them got caught, the rest would just proceed with the plan as usual? But the barbarism is plenty of justification to oppose it wholeheartedly as well...

You don't have to know what you really are before you can criticize others for thinking you are something you are not, you just have to know what you really are not—processes of elimination are tried and true, definitions always have been and always will be arbitrary.

Ha ha ha, there's a moment in Benjamin Button where the daughter remembers her one brief encounter with her biological father. And at that moment I realized the entire story was made up by the mother to explain to her daughter her odd affair with a man far younger than herself!

5·27·09And as I knew I would.

Ha ha ha, imagine your consciousness were flowing through time from the future to the past, so things we consider going from a to b would appear to go from b to a. You'd always be sucking things out of the toilet and hurling whole food onto plates in whole un-chewed bites.

5·31·09"There's no more wiggle room on your rap sheet.""The sound of a fuse being lit.""Slightly damaged, and thats always a plus.""Bend over for destiny."

If you look at the sky, you can see the beginning of time.Homo Habitus was the first to use tools.Speak your mind. Don't back down.And would you stay?

Yesterday I was working on a kenken puzzle, and I realized that it could involve chains of logic that were just too large for me to grasp, and that computers would obviously be more suited to dealing with these longer chains of logic. Which immediately struck me as a clear argument for why computers could soon "know" or "understand" things that humans simply cannot. It might also lead to computers behaving in ways that are completely incomprehensible (to us).

Ah ha! Science operates on contradicting evidence. What is important is that you have evidence that indicates the world is necessarily one way, and then you have comparably persuasive evidence indicating that the world is another way. It is the process of seeking out phenomena that are poorly understood (phenomena which lack a complete description, where description means a causal relationship), and evolving the description of the world according to what best resolves the contradictions between the evidence.Science is that description, as well as the process of evolving it. If science were to have a dogma, it would have to be something along the lines of "evidence and coherency above all else". It should be recalled that humans are not perfect, every one of us makes mistakes of every imaginable sort. Evidence can be a very tricky thing to sort out, and much time and care must be taken to ensure that our own mistakes do not infect our evidence and distort it. The easiest (and maybe only?) way to do this is to doubt everything. Doubt your senses, doubt other's experience, doubt experts, doubt existence, doubt EVERYTHING. But don't let that inhibit the construction of a coherent explanation, just use it to remember that all evidence is subject to rejection in the future. Develop your explanations, and weigh the evidence appropriately. This might be best illustrated by example, and I happen to have an excellent one, related to the eminent physicist Richard Feynman, who was asked about the likelihood that aliens exist. He responded that accounts of extraterrestrial experiences are much more easily explained in terms of the known irrational behavior of terrestrial beings, than the unknown rational behavior of extraterrestrials. Scientists exert incredible effort to artificially construct situations in which the mistakes and biases and irrationality of humans is minimized, trying to expose the phenomena maximally and avoid any tainting by our inherent shortcomings, nevertheless, such shortcomings will inevitably remain to some degree.Now we can get into the heart of the matter: as conscious organisms with a memory that has some degree of persistence, we make a lot of observations, nearly all of which suffer, from some degree, of our imperfections. However, the base observations are still mostly reliable, though certainly less reliable than scientific experiment, which as I said before, were carefully constructed to remove and resist most of the human mistakes.

Feynman said, "Is no one inspired by our present picture of the universe? This value of science remains unsung by singers, you are reduced to hearing not a song or poem, but an evening lecture about it. This is not yet a scientific age."

I like how first facebook makes us feel like we have way more friends than we really do, then emphasizes how poorly we all know each other by these quizzes.But we were never so together. How can you resurrect straight into a wreck?I have overwhelming urges to share science with anyone and everyone; and yet I know that not everyone cares, and not everyone even needs to, or should care. How far do I go in sharing my passions with others, before it is too far?

Ha ha ha hah ha:"I’m not going to bore you with the details of what the whole “Is P equal to NP or not?” question is, other than the fact that it’s one of the Great Mysteries of computer science. From a mathematician’s point of view, solving it would be a bigger deal than solving Fermat’s Last Theorem. It’s so big a deal and so hard a problem that there’s a US$1 million reward to the first person to submit a viable proof.Simply put, I’d just broken up with either the biggest liar I’ve ever dated or the greatest computer scientist who ever lived. Somewhere, Alan Turing’s coffin was experiencing fantastic rotational torque."

Anyone ever notice how one of my more common greetings, especially online, is "hello"? I just found this on wiktionary: "the greeting hello is among the most generic and neutral in use. It may be heard in nearly all social situations and in nearly all walks of life, and is unlikely to cause offense." Likewise, I am very fond of "bye bye", which is listed as an antonym.

About Me

I enjoy untying knots. I have a deep and unfounded appreciation for all humankind.
What you see is what you get. Except for politicians. And relationships. And book covers. And land mines. And plot twists. And sink holes. And the media. And fashion. And of course ice bergs too.
I find more things than I should profound. I fall in love with every noun, but it is okay because it is not contagious. I am both deeply superficial and superficially deep.